Murder in the Rue Chartres

by Greg Herren

  And almost immediately regretted the decision.

  Few businesses were open. Most of them still had their show windows boarded up. There was a noticeable absence of both cars and pedestrians. The traffic light at Jackson wasn’t working, and the National Guard had set up stop signs on small easels that were almost impossible to see. The Dunn and Sonnier Floral Shop at the corner had lost the wall facing Jackson Avenue, which had collapsed into a huge pile of dusty red bricks piled up on the sidewalk. There was a hand-painted sign atop the bricks, reading DO NOT REMOVE BRICKS. Like St. Charles, the sidewalks were covered with bagged garbage and piles of tree limbs. Some of the lampposts were bent into low angles over the street, and a telephone pole close to Washington Avenue looked like it was going to fall at the next gust of wind. It looked like one of those abandoned ghost towns in the old West. I’d always taken the vibrant life of the city for granted and regretted, as I passed closed business after closed business, all my bitching before about pedestrians and getting stuck in traffic.

  I turned onto Fourth Street and parked in front of the address Paige had given me. Surrounding the entire property was a black iron fence, sunk into a retaining wall of cement, about a foot high. The house was huge, painted white with green shutters. It was about a three-story Victorian house, with a verandah that ran around the entire first floor. Some of the windows in the uppermost floor were still covered with plywood boards, and the shutters on the second floor were closed. The massive lawn was unkempt, as though it hadn’t been mowed in weeks. There was another, unattached building in the rear. A driveway lined with a hedge on both sides led up to the house, and several expensive cars sat there. There was a big fountain in the center of the yard in front of the house, but it was completely dry. I stood there and looked at the house for a moment, and read the plaque mounted on the fence next to the gate. The house, like so many of the others in the neighborhood, was on the national registry of historic homes, and the plaque mentioned the architect who’d designed and built it for Henri Verlaine as a gift to his wife, Alais.

  I’d never heard of the architect, but that didn’t mean anything. I wasn’t an expert on the history of New Orleans architecture.

  I walked up to the gate and pushed the button. I stood there for a moment, watching the house. There was a flutter at the curtained windows beside the front door, and then the gate buzzed. I pushed it open and walked up the sidewalk.

  As I reached the top of the steps, the front door opened to reveal a rather stout black woman in a maid’s uniform. Her hair was shot through with gray, and her eyes were lined with red. I got a strong sense that she had a lot of inner strength. Her strong face was lined, but her eyes showed intelligence and wariness. She looked like one of those women who always dressed like a queen to go to church on Sunday and prayed regularly, yet had a strong bedrock of common sense at her core. “Yes?” she asked in a higher-pitched voice than I expected. She didn’t smile.

  “Um, is there a member of the family available?” I asked. I felt awkward under her stare, and found myself shifting my weight from foot to foot.

  “Why?” Her facial expression didn’t change, and I got the sense she was weighing my worth in her mind.

  The question was inevitable, and I’d been racking my mind all morning to come up with the right answer. Garden District families rarely, if ever, answer their own doors, but at the same time I doubted the Verlaines wanted me telling their maid about Iris’s business. Particularly when it was family business. My landlady, Barbara Castlemaine, lived a block over on Third Street, and no matter how many times she told me she considered her housekeeper “family,” I never fully believed her. After all, it wasn’t as if Barbara’s housekeeper took meals with her, or was a guest at her parties. After an awkward silence, I finally said, “I worked for Iris Verlaine.” I handed her one of my business cards, hoping that would do the trick.

  Her face showed no change other than a slight twitch at the hinge of her jaw. She didn’t even look at my card. Instead, she held the door open and gestured to a doorway to the right. “Wait in the parlor.” She walked down the hallway and disappeared around a corner.

  I walked in and sat down in an incredibly uncomfortable chair that was probably an antique. The room was large, with high ceilings and a massive chandelier that caught and reflected the sunlight coming through the big windows. There was a massive piano in one corner, its deeply polished wood gleaming, an oil painting over the fireplace, and several uncomfortable-looking chairs that matched the chair I was sitting in. The polished floor was partially covered by an old Oriental rug that was probably worth more than my car. There was no dust anywhere, no cobwebs on the chandelier. Eighty percent of the city might have been destroyed, but the Verlaine home was a well-kept museum. The air was stagnant, as though the windows hadn’t been opened since the Second World War. The oil painting was from the 1800s, and from the stern look on the man’s face, it probably was old Henri Verlaine himself. He looked like the kind of man who would found a family fortune—mean and driven.

  “Mr. MacLeod?”

  I stood up and turned to shake hands with a man who looked to be in his early forties.

  “Joshua Verlaine,” he said. “I’m Iris’s oldest brother.”

  His hair was that unnatural shade of black that comes from a bottle. There were lines on his reddish round face and dark circles under his eyes, reaching down almost to the middle of his nose. He was thin-lipped and his smile barely seemed to penetrate his heavy cheeks. There was a spot of dried blood on his upper lip, and he had missed a place shaving just to the right underside of his chin. His blue eyes were watery and bloodshot, and his hand soft and a little damp. He was low waisted and big-bellied, so he looked top-heavy, his jeans crisply ironed blue pencils hanging down from a large inflated balloon covered with yellow cashmere. Under his cologne was a slight odor of stale liquor. “Have a seat,” he said, gesturing me back into the uncomfortable chair. He himself sat down on the matching loveseat. He crossed one leg over the other. “So, Iris hired a private eye?” He ran a hand over his slick hair. “This was about Daddy, wasn’t it?”

  I didn’t answer at first because I was trying to remember the last time I heard a man in his forties say daddy. I pulled her check from my shirt pocket and handed it over to him. I decided to ignore his question. “She hired me the Wednesday before the storm to do a job for her. Obviously, she no longer needs the job done. I wanted to return that.” No sense in telling him she actually had fired me rather abruptly two days later by leaving a message on my machine.

  He looked at the check. “You should have cashed it. I wondered what it was for when I went through her records, but we would have honored it.” He barked out a laugh. “Most people would have, you know.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t like taking people’s money when I haven’t earned it.”

  “An honest man, by God, in New Orleans!” He glanced at his watch. “Would you like a drink, Mr. MacLeod?”

  Out of the corner of my eye I noticed the clock on the mantel read ten forty-five. “No, thank you,” I said, standing up. “I should be going. I don’t want to take up a lot of your time.”

  I’d taken a dislike to the place and wanted to get out so I could breathe again. The place didn’t look lived in, not one thing slightly askew for the human touch of chaos that every home seems to have if you look carefully enough. I didn’t much care for Joshua Verlaine, either. I’d known too many guys like him in my fraternity back at LSU—spoiled and privileged good ole boys who acted like your best friend so they could get close enough to stick the knife in your back at the first opportunity.

  “Don’t be absurd.” He walked over to the side table and poured himself a very stiff bourbon on the rocks. “You sure you don’t want something? Water?”

  “I really should be going—”

  “Where have you got to go?” he asked. He barked out that laugh again. “Welcome to post-Katrina New Orleans. None of us have anywhere to be.” He took
a swig from the glass. “Now sit down and tell me why Iris hired you. It was Daddy, wasn’t it?”

  I swallowed. Much as I hated to admit it, he was right. I didn’t have anywhere to go, except to drive around the city and look some more—or go home and watch mindless hours of television. It wasn’t like the phone was going to ring. Neither prospect was any more appealing than spending more time in the Verlaine mausoleum. I considered my options for a moment, and then I sat back down. “I’ll have a glass of ice water then, if you don’t mind.”

  He handed me the glass before he sat back down on the divan. “Iris had a thing about Daddy. I guess it was because she never knew him, and of course by the time she was born Mother had erased him from our lives completely.”

  “I take it the divorce was unpleasant?”

  He laughed again and took another drink. “The divorce was pleasant because he was long gone by the time Mother went to court. One day, he was just gone. Darrin and I had no idea what happened …I mean, they always say the kids know, no matter how much you try to hide it from them, when there’s trouble between their parents, but hell, it took me and Darrin totally by surprise. Gone, poof, never heard from again.” He snapped his fingers and finished his drink. “Mother got rid of every picture of him, and Grandpa, well, basically he forbade us from talking about him or mentioning him to her ever again.”

  “She didn’t explain why?” I sipped my water. “That seems rather odd.”

  “Mother never explained anything.” He put his glass down. “If it was unpleasant, there was no need to talk about it. That’s just the way she was, bless her heart—he was gone and that was the end of it in her mind. Grandpa, though, took me and Darrin—that’s my younger brother—aside a few days after the pictures disappeared and told us that Daddy had left us because he didn’t want to be married to our Mother anymore. Mother was upset, and didn’t want to talk about it, so we weren’t to say anything to her about him anymore. He didn’t know if we would ever see Daddy anymore, but he thought Daddy was never coming back.” He laughed again, a little bitterly. “I could tell Grandpa wasn’t one bit sorry Daddy was gone. He never liked Daddy much, we could all tell that. You didn’t have to be a private eye to figure that out.”

  “How old were you?” I felt myself softening a bit toward him. There was pain in his voice and etched on his face, even after all this time. And he obviously had loved his sister. Maybe I’d been too quick to judge.

  “I was ten, I think, ten or eleven. Mother was still pregnant with Iris, and I’m a little under eleven years older than her…I really don’t remember much about that time.” He shrugged. “School was out, so it was sometime in the summer.”

  If my father had disappeared when I was ten, I’d have led the cheers. “Were you close to your father?”

  “I have good memories of him, if that’s what you mean. I was upset when he was gone. Darrin was about six, so Grandpa told me I had to help him be strong…and besides, you know, boys don’t cry.” He looked down at his hands. “But yeah, I missed him. He was a painter, you know? He used to let me play with his paints and make my own paintings.” He laughed again. “Mine were terrible. I’d certainly not inherited his talent.” He shook his head. “To this day, I don’t understand how he could just take off like that, never see us again. I’m divorced myself, but I see my kids every chance I get. What kind of man does that to his kids? No matter how big a bitch Mother might have been, he could have tried to see us.” He bit his lower lip. “But you know, Mother changed after Daddy left. She was never a real warm woman, but afterward…” He scratched his head. “It was like she forgot how to laugh.”

  “And Iris?” I prompted him. I was trying to imagine what it would have been like for her.

  He blew out a sigh. “It bugged her that he left, that she never knew him. A lot. I mean, for Darrin and me, well, at least we got a chance to know our dad. She never did…and well, I don’t know. I’d say to her she was better off than we were because she didn’t know him at all, so she didn’t miss him, if you know what I mean.” He shook his head. “She never said anything to Mother, of course. But she used to talk to me about it from time to time. I’d tell her to just let it go—if he wanted to see us he knew where we were—but every once in a while, she’d start thinking about it again. It was her particular little craziness, and after she started planning her wedding, I knew it was going to come up again.” His eyes got wet. “And now, of course, she’s dead… We haven’t even been able to have a memorial service, you know?” He looked away from me. “I mean, can you imagine? The police came by late that Friday night; I had to go identify her body—and then the next day we had to get ready for the fucking hurricane.”

  I tried to imagine what it would be like. I speak to my sister about once or twice a year. We exchange half-hearted Christmas cards and call each other on our birthdays—awkward phone calls out of obligation, with a lot of silence while we try to think of things to say. We didn’t have much in common when we were kids; we have even less now. We’d both put Cottonwood Wells and the trailer park firmly in the past, and we never spoke about our parents. I don’t know if she ever talks to them or not, but if she does, she never says anything about it to me. I’ve never even told her that I’m gay, but I’m pretty sure she’s figured it out. She’s one of those Super Moms now, driving all over Houston in her SUV, taking her kids to this practice and that class and running errands, a cup of latte in the cup-holder and a cell phone in one hand. But even so, it would be a shock to find out she was dead, murdered, from the police, and before you even got a chance to grieve, a massive hurricane was heading for your home. “I’m sorry,” I said, and I meant it.

  “And of course, the days after when the city was being looted and we didn’t have power, all we could do was sit around and drink everything in the wine cellar and think about Iris, wonder what happened to her, where her body wound up—they were keeping her for the coroner, whenever that was going to happen, and by then we’d have the Bultman Funeral Home take care of everything…but then the fucking storm came.” He got up and poured himself another glass of bourbon. “And now all we get is a runaround. I know damned well they don’t know where she is. I think the morgue flooded, and her body sat around in that fucking water for weeks, that’s what I think happened, and no one has the goddamned balls to tell us.” He sat back down. “What the fuck do they think, we’re going to sue them? Like they were going to evacuate bodies out when they couldn’t evacuate people out of the city? Jesus fucking Christ.”

  I didn’t have the slightest idea how to answer that and was wishing I’d just left when I’d had the chance. Over the years, I’ve noticed that sometimes a private eye winds up being a bit of a therapist, which made me wish I’d paid more attention in my Psych class back at LSU. But sometimes people don’t want you to say anything—they just want you to listen, no matter how uncomfortable you are with what they are saying. They’re not looking for an answer to what’s eating them alive, they just want to get it all out of their system. And Joshua Verlaine didn’t seem to have anyone he could talk to about any of this. I wondered what the younger brother, Darrin, was like.

  Sounded to me like the whole family was fucked up.

  “You know something?” He finished the second glass in a single gulp. “You stay right here.” He weaved a little bit as he walked out of the room, and I heard his footsteps going up the stairs.

  Get out of here, I told myself, and glanced out the doorway. I saw the maid standing there, her lips pursed. When our eyes met, she shook her head and moved down the hallway out of sight. I looked around the room again, and started studying the portrait over the fireplace. It was from the mid-1800s, judging by the style of the clothes and the stern look on the subject’s face. There was absolutely no resemblance between the man and Joshua Verlaine, but then the bloodline had undoubtedly been diluted enough over the years. He looked tough, the kind of man who would shake your hand and then fuck you over at the first opportunity if
it benefited him in the slightest way. I stared at him and wondered how he would have handled the storm and its aftermath. With piss and vinegar, and an eye to turning a profit out of it. Those, I thought, were the men who built this country. It couldn’t have easy being either married to him or one of his children.

  Joshua came back in clutching a checkbook, and gave me a half-smile. “Mean-looking bastard, isn’t he? That’s the great Henri Verlaine, to whom we owe everything.”

  He sat down on the divan again, leaning forward to make out a check. He tore it out and handed it to me. “There. Take this.”

  It was for ten thousand dollars. “Um—” I stared down at it.

  “I want you to find Daddy.” He waved his hand. “Iris wanted him found, for whatever the hell reason she did, and you know something? I’d kind of like to see the bastard myself. I’ve got a few questions for dear old Dad.”

  “You’re hiring me.” It’s really never a good idea to make a business deal with someone a little the worse for alcohol. “You’re sure you want to do this?”

  He sat up straighter. “Mr. MacLeod,” he said in an almost regal tone, one he undoubtedly used with the house’s staff, “I may not be able to legally operate an automobile in my current state, but I am certainly not intoxicated enough to have my mental faculties impaired. Yes. I am hiring you.”

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to work for Joshua Verlaine. He’d probably sober up and stop payment on the check, and regret spilling the family secrets to me. But then again, what else did I have to do? And I was starting to like him—well, at least feel sorry for him. “You realize that it’s highly likely that he’s not alive,” I said, realizing I was telling him the same thing I told Iris. “And the trail, even if he is alive, is pretty cold.”

  But it was what she wanted. She hired you. He just wants you to finish the job—for a lot more money, that wretched little voice inside my head whispered. And it’s not like you have anything else to do anyway. Stop trying to talk him out of hiring you. You could stand to have something to keep you occupied, or you could end up on pills and drinking a lot. He’s just trying to honor his sister’s last wish—he can’t bury her or do any of the things you do when someone you love dies. How would you feel if it was Paul? If you had no idea what happened to his body and you couldn’t get an answer from anyone as to what happened to it?